Day 98

We woke up this morning to some delicious breakfast and delicious news. The continental breakfast at The Holiday Inn was phenomenal! Eggs, Fruit Loops, cinnamon buns, and passionfruit juice, mmmmmmm mmmmmmmm. After polishing off a well deserved breakfast I worked on figuring out how the heck I was going to get my shoes. I called a few different Post Offices and did some research on the rest of our route. I was pretty sure all hope was lost until I gave the Prescott Post Office one more time and got in touch with my main man Ed. Ed was by far the most helpful person throughout this entire process. He told me my packages had arrived, and if I came down he could make an exception to the usual 1pm-4pm time frame allowed for General Delivery. I was pretty excited, especially when I found out swinging by the Post Office would only add on a mile or so to the day. The other great news we recieved was an e-mail from my mom's cousin Betsy who lives here in Prescott, I'll get to that later.

We bummed around the hotel for awhile in no real hurry to get moving. We were about to leave when we caught the end of an episode of Saved By The Bell where Screech plays The Russian kid from Valley. It was an epic battle, I'd say 95% as epic as The Cold War and about 15% as epic as the fight between Rocky Balboa and Ivan Drago. The match was so highly anticipated that Zach and Slater made a bet with some of the kids from Valley. The kids from Valley stole Screech's lucky hat, so to even the playing field Slater and "Preppy" stole The Russian! Zach dressed up as The Russian and threw the game, but Belding knew something was up. After all was said and done a re-match was underway. It was a classic fast-motion game, filled with ragtime piano. In the end Screech took home the title and we all learned a lesson. After this we were all set to go. The joggers were packed, our stomachs were full and it looked like we were going to hit the road. That is until we realized an episode of Fresh Prince was coming up next. We decided we didn't have too far to go today, so why not?

Around 9:30 we finally got on our way. We made our way to downtown Prescott through some very busy construction on a very busy road. It was pretty scary for awhile, but we took our time and made it through safely. We eventually got to the Post Office where some new shoes, homemade cookies and branch chain amino acids were waiting for me. I caused a minor scene in the Post Office as everyone saw me throw out a perfectly good pair of running shoes so I could replace them with my last two pairs.

We got on our way out of Prescott, for the most part it was uphill and pretty slow going. We eventually made it out of the city and to a very mountainous region. It was some very beautiful, but dangerous country. We ran back and forth on a winding road that went up and down and side to side more times than we could count. We stayed as far off the road as we could, and didn't have any major problems.

Around 1pm I got a call from my mom's cousin Betsy saying she'd be glad to pick us up at the end of our day. I was obviously pretty excited about this, and the guys were glad to hear we'd get to eat and shower tonight. Soon enough we made it to our planned stop for the night, Wilhoit. There was a small bar serving lunch as we got into town, so we stopped in for some eats. A few of the patrons had seen us earlier in the day coming from Prescott, and everyone seemed pretty impressed.

After we ate we decided we'd get a few more miles in before getting picked up for the night. We made it about 5 or 6 miles outside of town before taking a nice sit in the little shade we could find. It was a pretty relaxing time waiting around. We made up some dumb games to pass the time and worked on planning out the rest of the trip. We realized Andy and I have a package in Aguila, however we'll be getting there on Saturday when the Post Office will be closed. Just when I think my package hunting days are over, this happens. I'm sure we'll come up with some crazy scheme and everything will work out.

Betsy pulled up around 6:30 or so and we quickly loaded up the car, she could tell we've done this before. Right off the bat she recognized me and told me she could tell I had some Calvert in me, I'm still not sure if thats a compliment or not. We took the winding road back to Prescott and talked about our trip. It's hard to realize how long we've been out on the road, but talking about it today really put a lot in perspective for me. It has been an incredable trip so far, and I'm sure its just going to get better from here on out.

We made it back to Betsy's house and unloaded what we needed for the night. We took some showers and Betsy and Kirby made us some delicious cheeseburgers. We told them some more stories and discussed life in Oneonta. I forgot to mention before Betsy is an Oneonta Alumni, and lived near Fortin Park, our home Cross Country course for quite some time.

It's been great meeting up with a relative out here, especially since it came by suprise like this. I could tell how excited my mom and grandma were when I told them where we were staying tonight, it was a really good feeling.

Tomorrow we'll truck back out to where we finished today and make our way to Congress. Word on the street is there's an excellent diner about halfway between where we stopped today and where we'll finish tomorrow so we're all looking forward to that.

Nation!
Durkin!